Tweetbot for Mac alpha pulled, Tapbot blames Twitter

The developers behind Tweetbot for Mac, the Mac desktop software version of the popular paid-for Twitter iOS app, has been forced to pull the application because of new changes brought in by Twitter.

In a move that shows the effects the new changes that limit third-party developers have to deal with, the company behind the app, Tapbot, has admitted that it can't offer the app any more.

"As some of you may have already noticed, the download link for the Tweetbot for Mac alpha no longer works," the company says on its official blog. "Twitter’s latest API Changes means now we have a large but finite limit on the number of user tokens we can get for Tweetbot for Mac."

According to the company, it has been working with Twitter over the past few days to try to work around this limit for the duration of the beta, but has been unable to come up with an acceptable solution.

Twitter has started to clamp down on what third-party apps such as Tweetbot can and can't do as it looks to claw back users to its official apps to allow it to greater control of revenues.

Twitter announced earlier in August that it would limit all third-party apps to just 100,000 users, or twice the number of users they already have.

The developers say that allowing people to use of one of those "valuable" tokens merely to "trial" the software means they lose that token forever, something it doesn't want to do because it plans to sell Tweetbot for Mac in the future.

"Tweetbot for Mac will still be available for sale in the near future, we are just stopping the public part of the alpha/beta testing," the company has been forced to tell prospective users.